by Blair Hurley
This was another catechism, a second codified world. You could be born into belief, be a member, without knowing a thing. But as a convert, you had to know it all.
And what did Master Dogen teach? the roshi asked, unsmiling.
Master Dogen brought the principles of Zen from China to Japan.
What is zazen?
Zazen is seated meditation, the cornerstone of Zen practice.
What is sanzen?
A private meeting with your Zen master. It is essential to advancing in your training.
What is recorded in the heart sutra?
The Heart Sutra tells us what the experience of liberation is like, and how the body is inseparable from the mind.
The Lotus Sutra?
It contains the final teaching of the Buddha, it assures us of the possibility of enlightenment for all, and it explains that faith in the sutra is itself sufficient for salvation.
How many Buddhas are there?
Innumerable.
How many are contained within a drop of water?
Innumerable.
What is the nembutsu?
The recitation of the Buddha’s name.
Recite, please.
Namu Amida butsu.
How many times must you recite it to achieve enlightenment?
Only once, with perfect clarity.
What is the Pure Land prayer?
The prayer to be reborn in a world free of defilement, where enlightenment is easily obtained.
What is nonbeing?
It is neither being nor not being.
The questioning continued. How will Amida Buddha help you? How will Quan Yin protect you? How will Mara deceive you? What turns the wheel of samsara? Recite, please. In Japanese, please. By what process does its turning cease?
She could feel panic arriving as a lowering of her blood pressure, a gradual blackening of her peripheral vision. Her feet were numb. Her answers petered out without reverberation, sadly, in the densely quiet room.
Finally, the roshi reached his last question. “What do you hope to accomplish?” he asked.
“I—” She fell silent. This was a question she couldn’t answer. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you come here?” he asked more gently, trying to help her along.
There were no easy answers she could give: I want to feel centered. I want to live in the moment more. So many nice reasons. “I had to come,” she said. “I have always wanted to live clearly. With purpose. I have always wanted to be awake, fully awake, every minute of my life.”
The roshi nodded and raised his hand. For a moment she thought he would ring the dreaded bell and send her away. “You understand the basics. But there is still much to be learned.”
“So you’ll take me as your student?” she asked tentatively.
He gave a small shake of his head—whether a refusal or an acknowledgment that things weren’t so simple, she wasn’t sure. “I would like to put you in my Saturday class. It is starting soon—you can join us now.”
She nodded, and bowed again, once to him and once to the Buddha statue. A monk entered after some invisible signal and led her down the hall to a large studio space. She saw the easel set out by the door with its humiliating script: BEGINNING MEDITATION.
Inside, the studio was crowded; people were straightening themselves on the floor, assuming the familiar position, waiting for the roshi to take his place at the front of the room. They wore a strange combination of church clothes and workout gear, some there as practitioners, some there as hobbyists, chatting amiably as they laid out their mats and lined their shoes (sparkly ballet flats, heels, pink Converse sneakers) along the wall. She stopped in the doorway and scanned the room to make sure she was right: they were all women.
She laid out a mat for herself and put down her coat to claim it, then went out into the rice-paper hall. She followed it deeper into the building. A few rooms down, she could hear a distant, throbbing sound, like the repeated plucking of the lowest string on a guitar. She followed it, sidestepping a standard saying, RESIDENTS ONLY. She pressed her ear to a closed door: the roshi was leading his monks in a prayer session. She could hear them chanting in a deep repetitive bass, singing the words to a sutra and ringing a bell at intervals to maintain the rhythm. Their chanting climbed a long hill of verse, then paused to gather a collective breath and continued to climb. She knew the words they were chanting. She knew the purpose of the bell. Through the thick door, their voices sounded like the humming of many bees.
She returned to the meditation room, listening to the women talk around her, catching up on the week’s gossip. “You’re new, aren’t you,” one woman said, large and wavy-haired and smiling. “I’m Jeannie.” She made introductions: Lucille, Maxine, Georgia. Each person tossed off a frank declaration of what they were doing there: Lucille had anxiety; Maxine was trying to expel toxins from her body. She’d started with gluten and white sugar, and now she was busy ridding herself of cortisol, the stress hormone known to shorten the life span of your cells. The women smiled, agreeing. “What brings you here?” asked Jeannie.
She shrugged. Now the answer she had given the roshi sounded pretentious. “I’m a student,” she said.
The roshi entered and the women hustled back to their mats, whispering like guilty schoolkids. “Let us begin with one hour of silent meditation,” he said.
But it was no kind of quiet at all. Impatience rippled through the sunny mirrored dance studio. The women in the group could manage only half an hour, and then it was like the minutes in a movie theater after the lights have dimmed, when a sudden torrent of whispers and throat clearings fills the darkness. The room buzzed with restless shiftings, coughs, phlegmy snorts. A cell phone rang. Nicole watched the guilty party check her phone—the nerve!—before shutting it off. Gum was unwrapped, audibly, and chewed, resoundingly. It reminded her of Helen’s Zen cow joke. Mu. Mu. She sat near the back, using most of her energy to control her anger.
She took the subway home in a confused state. There were no seats on the train, and she swayed back and forth among the bodies, feeling her irritation grow every time a warm sweaty hand touched hers or a swinging bag bumped her ribs. On the crowded escalator to the street she felt a sudden explosion of rage, as if an organ had ruptured inside her body. She wanted to kick the person in front of her. If you would only move one stupid step to the right—just move! She wanted to scream. She looked behind herself, down the long mechanical slope, at the prayerful heads bent over phones. She wanted to snarl, spit, swear. They would think she was a madwoman, another lunatic lost in this city.
In her little studio, still cluttered with boxes, she fed Kukai and sat on the floor, pressing her back to the cool white wall, and ate noodles from a bowl in her lap and listened to the sounds of her neighbors coming home. The stamp of shoes on tile, the squeak of a chair, friendly voices greeting each other. She heard silverware chime, the sizzle and chop of cooking. The sounds weren’t unique; they were utterly generic, the sounds of dinner, talking, laughter, things you could hear anywhere, in a million different rooms in any city. Sounds of normalcy, family, happiness or unhappiness.
She picked up the phone and called Sean.
During the first three rings, she dug the nails of one hand into the other wrist. Then he picked up, and when he said, “Hello?” she half-cried, “Where have you been?”
He laughed, sheepish. “I thought you told me not to call.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually listen to me.”
“Well, I didn’t want to. It’s been lonely here.”
At those words she felt a glad rush, mixed with a curious sadness. She didn’t want him to feel lonely. He didn’t deserve it.
“How’s New York?” he asked.
“It’s good. Yeah—good.”
“Don’t be too enthusiastic. I’ll start to think you don’t miss me.”
“Ha. Well, I do.”
“I do, too. Come back and visit soon. Will you?”
> “Oh, I don’t know. My father, you know.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten what I look like.” He had a funny streak.
“No, I remember,” she said. “Have you forgotten what I look like?”
“No, but I’d like to see more of you. Half the time we were in the dark.”
She moved to the couch, tilted her head back. “I’ve been missing you nights especially.”
“Me too.”
She said, dreading the response, “Are you thinking about what we’d be doing if I were there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I wish I could touch you right now,” he said.
She arched against the back of the couch, letting pressure and warmth seep into her, imagining Sean’s weight on top of her. It had been a while, too long, since she’d talked to anyone this way. But it was difficult: there were some words she couldn’t bring herself to say. They were words that didn’t belong in her, that Catholicism had excised from her mouth, her body. Words like “cock” and “pussy” and “fuck.” And how could you get what you really wanted without them, with only a voice on a telephone line. Instead she listened to the huff of static that came each time Sean breathed too harshly into the receiver.
“Sean,” she said softly. The road outside began to hiss with rain. Above the grocery, a shadow moved by a lit curtain and stopped there, watching. Somewhere beyond that building and the next, beyond the big dirty rivers, the woods and highways, a ten-year rope was tugging. Her Master had told her, I’ve taught you so many things about yourself. Even about your own body, about what you want from it. How could you want anything else?
If she stayed on this line, if she held on, perhaps Sean could silence that voice.
“Sean. Sean. Oh, Sean.”
“They’re going to drive me crazy,” she told Jocelyn.
They were drinking coffee in Nicole’s apartment, and she was explaining about the other women in the meditation group. Jocelyn was a ready audience, not just for her conversion story but for her current problems. She brought baby Emmeline and sat her in a bouncy chair and told Nicole about how hard it was to be married to a doctor, how for weeks at a time he was not much more than a harried, smiling face at the door. But Jocelyn never complained. With her sweet face, her languid sprawl across the couch, she absorbed Nicole’s frustration beautifully. She explained wearily that having a baby is one of those times when you see your life change in front of your eyes. She said, “You have to figure out where you fit into it. Are you a mother now? Is that all you are?”
Jocelyn was the only person whom she’d told her story from the beginning. There was something exhilarating about that. A friend, a real friend.
“So you’re sticking with this new teacher?” Jocelyn asked doubtfully. “This one isn’t taking you seriously, and the women are amateurs. Maybe you should talk to your old Master.”
“I can’t go back,” Nicole said. “But I don’t know if I’m going forward.”
Jocelyn smiled. “You’re wasted on them.”
“No, no. I understand how hard it is.” There was the part where you forgot to count your breaths; the part where your body began to itch uncontrollably, first your scalp, then your back, then your groin; there was the part where your knees began to ache and your head to fill with the loud, tuneless humming of whatever song you hated the most.
If you sat through that, and managed to go deeper into the dense black mess of your brain, you might find something, like the entrance to a tunnel you didn’t know was inside you. You’d feel your way along the damp walls in total blackness, the silence beginning to lap through the channels and chambers of your heart, your brain, the way the fever of noise had before.
But you had to get there on your own. She’d done her time.
“What’s it like, afterward?” Jocelyn asked. “Are they nice?”
“Well . . .”
When the bell rang and the meditation session was over, the women began to talk at once, filling the room with relieved chatter. The roshi had to call for order. “You ladies are like birds, always hopping and twittering,” he said. “Your minds are wild monkeys.” The women laughed.
Once he was gone, they rolled up their mats. Jeannie always began with an update on her fibromyalgia. And Lucille with her panic attacks, and Maxine with those toxins lodged in her body. Everyone knew. They were sick, full of poison, aching with syndromes they couldn’t name. No one really knew why. But they were on a ceaseless search for relief.
Nicole was learning that there were three basic categories of people who came to practice. There were the purifiers. They compared notes on juice cleanses, cell phone radiation, and BPA-free plastics. Cortisol, the stress hormone, was clogging the brain, causing early-onset Alzheimer’s, increasing the risk for cancers of all sizes and shapes and kinds. Meditation was one more weapon in the battle to live.
There were the spiritualists. They spoke cheerfully of opening one’s chakras, of getting in touch with their Buddha natures. Anything foreign—a Japanese kanji, a Qur’an, an incense stick—was beautiful and strange and pulled them helplessly in like moths.
And there were the sufferers. The women undergoing chemotherapy. The women embarking on divorce, nervous as horses before a storm. The women who had lost spouses or parents or children. The women who had been raped, long ago or not so long ago, and still did not feel whole.
They were tired and overworked, irritable and overpaid. Lonely and restless and panicky. In the most recent session, Jeannie had said, “Sometimes I think I’ll never be out of pain. I’ll just never get better at this.”
“At what?” someone asked, and she said, helplessly, “Being alive.”
“The meditation will help,” Lucille said.
“But I never get better at that, either. Ten minutes and I tap out.”
“If you hold something in your hand, you can concentrate longer,” said Nicole.
Everyone looked at her. She went on, beginning to sweat: “It’s a technique—in the oldest sutras. Hold something simple, like a rock or a lump of clay, and concentrate on its feel. Focus on the experience of holding it.”
“You know, I think I will try that,” said Jeannie, and heads began to nod around the circle. “Where did you learn such a thing?”
“From my old Master,” she said.
Jeannie considered this, tapping one spectacular red-polished nail on her chin. “You’re a sleeper, aren’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“A quiet type. But still waters run deep, right? You’ve been holding out on us. Listen to you, talking about sutras. You tell me,” Jeannie said, and there was a challenge in her voice. “Tell me what I should do about chronic pain. Tell me something Zen.”
Nicole took a deep breath. It was Helen’s test again. Give us a blessing. She recited, “Mara the deceiver god asked, What is being? Where does it come from?
“The nun replied: Why do you harp on the word ‘being’?
You have strayed, Mara, into confused views.
A mere bundle of compound aggregates:
There is no being to be found here . . .
Nothing but suffering comes to be,
Nothing but suffering ceases.”
“What does it mean?” Jeannie asked.
“When we are in pain, we tend to think it is part of our identity, our being. If we remember there is no permanent being—that we’re constantly changing—it’s easier to think of pain also changing. It can fade and cease to be, just as we change.”
The room was quiet. No breathing or sighing or shifting. The women were listening. For the first time in Nicole’s life, a small voice spoke hesitantly inside her: I could teach. I could even become a master.
“What brings you to New York?” asked Maxine.
“My brother wanted me near him. He’s very protective.” Then, in a blurt of honesty: “I’m a bit of a screwup in the family. I went AWOL for a while.”
Jeannie smiled. She stood up and walked across the circle to Nico
le, and touched her shoulders. “Honey, everyone needs to get away from their families once in a while,” she said. “That’s not screwing up. That’s life.”
“You like them,” said Jocelyn now, splashing more coffee into Nicole’s mug. “I can tell.”
She did like them. They reminded her of the old gang back in Boston. They were laughable and foolish, snobby and judgmental, safely ensconced in their privilege. But they tried hard. They wanted things so strongly.
And they kept coming up to her after sessions and telling her things.
In line for coffee in the lobby, Lisa said her husband was becoming impotent just as she was discovering she actually enjoyed and wanted sex for the first time in her life. “We’re out of sync,” she said. “All my life, I’ve discovered things too late.”
In the hallway, waiting for the advanced meditation class to end, Lacey whispered to her, “I get these night terrors. I see my husband, the kids in their car seats. I see myself buckling them in and driving off. Then we’re going the wrong way on the freeway. I read an article about this woman who drove the wrong way on the freeway and killed a carload of children.”
Georgia told her, as they waited in the subway, “I think of myself as made of sand. And every day you give away a handful of yourself to someone else. You give yourself to your parents and your children and your lovers, one by one. By the time I’m fifty, there’ll be nothing left.”
The stories came out involuntarily, whispered to her when they were walking down the street, pressed into her ear before she had fully turned around to see who it was.
“My friend’s cancer has returned. I’m not supposed to say anything. She hasn’t even told her husband.”
“Do you think meditation would help with ulcerative colitis?”
“When we sleep together, it’s good. It’s good because it’s not all weird in the morning. But then he doesn’t call for a week.”
